Renewals Landing in the First Quarter

Two kinds of renewal

Most renewals, if missed, cost you an awkward conversation and a reinstatement fee.

A small number take something down: the domain, the certificate, or the hosting.

When one of those lapses the site stops, the email stops, and for a domain the consequences can extend to losing it.

So the useful exercise is not a list of everything renewing, it is identifying the three or four that would cause an outage and treating those differently.

The ones that cause an outage

• The domain itself.
• The security certificate.
• Hosting.
• Email, where it is separate.
• Anything the site depends on to function.

The last is the one people miss. A payment plugin, a booking system, or a delivery integration on an annual licence can stop working on renewal day, and the site keeps loading while the thing that makes money does not.

The domain is the serious one

Worth separating, because the failure is not simply an outage.

An expired domain enters a period where it can be reclaimed at a fee, then a period where it costs considerably more, then becomes available to anybody.

During all of that the site and the email are down, and email sent to you disappears rather than bouncing usefully.

Businesses have lost domains they had used for a decade because a renewal notice went to an address nobody read.

Set it to renew automatically, check the card on file, and confirm the notice address is one somebody opens.

Where the domain is registered in a supplier's account rather than yours, that is a separate and more urgent problem.

Automatic renewal is not enough on its own

Since it fails in a predictable way.

The card expires, and the renewal attempt fails silently, with the notice going to whatever address was set up years ago.

That is the single most common cause of an unexpected outage on a small business site.

Check the expiry date of the card each of these is charged to, now, and note which renewals fall after it.

Where a card is due to expire in the first quarter, update it before the renewals rather than after the failure.

And use a business card rather than somebody's personal one, since a personal card leaving the business takes the renewals with it.

A worked example

A business found their site and email down on a Monday morning in February.

The domain had expired eleven days earlier, the automatic renewal had failed because the card had been replaced in December, and the notices had gone to an address belonging to a former employee.

Restoring it took two days and a redemption fee, during which they could not receive email at all.

Afterwards they moved the registration into an account the owner controlled, set the notice address to one two people read, updated the card, and put the renewal date in a shared diary with a reminder a month before.

The whole prevention was about twenty minutes.

Make the diary entry properly

Since the point of this is that somebody is prompted while there is time.

Put each outage-causing renewal in a shared calendar, on the actual date, with a reminder a month earlier.

Name what it is, what it costs, where it is managed, and who has access, in the entry itself.

A reminder saying domain renewal is useless in eleven months when nobody remembers which domain or which account.

Use a calendar the business owns rather than one person's, so it survives somebody leaving.

That is the diary entry that prevents the outage, and it is five minutes per item once a year.

Check who actually controls each one

The question that matters more than the date.

For each outage-causing item, establish whose account it sits in and whether you could log in today.

A domain in a developer's account, hosting bought by a former employee, or a certificate managed by somebody who has stopped answering are all common and all become urgent at the worst moment.

Where you cannot access something, resolving that now is worth more than any diary entry.

Record the answers alongside the dates, since this is the information nobody has when it is needed.

Certificates fail quietly

Worth a note, since the failure mode is distinctive.

An expired certificate produces a full-page browser warning telling visitors the site is not secure, which is worse than the site being down.

Most are now issued for short periods and renew automatically, which works until the automation breaks after a hosting change.

Check yours is valid and note the expiry, and check it again after any change to the hosting or the domain settings.

A free monitoring service that emails you before expiry costs nothing and removes this category entirely.

Spread the dates while you are looking

A small change that reduces the concentration permanently.

Where several renewals fall in the same fortnight, most providers will move a date on request, prorating the difference.

That turns a difficult January into four ordinary months, which matters more for cash than for administration.

It also means a card problem takes out one renewal rather than five, which is the failure this whole exercise is about.

Ask when you are renewing anyway, since the request is routine and is refused far less often than people expect.

The counter-case

This can be overdone.

Most renewals genuinely are ordinary bills and do not need a calendar entry, a note, or an owner.

Automatic renewal on a current card handles the overwhelming majority without any process at all.

And a business with three items in this category should not build a system for it, only a diary entry and a check.

List the three or four that cause an outage, confirm you control each, check the card, and set the reminders.

Twenty minutes

1. List what causes an outage, not everything.
2. Confirm you can log in to each today.
3. Check the card and its expiry date.
4. Check the notice address is read.
5. Diary each date with a month's reminder.
6. Put the details in the entry itself.
7. Set up certificate monitoring.

Step three prevents the most common version of this, since a replaced card silently breaks every automatic renewal attached to it and nothing tells you until something stops.

The cost side of the same list is covered in renewals that all land in January.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.